Wallace. I mean to beat this highbinder at his own favorite
game. If we yield to him he'll emasculate our profits. You gave me five
years when we first discussed this thing. In that time I can accomplish
it."

"Take seven if you need them. It's worth it."

Sitting in the smoking-car of the train that was transporting him again
from civilization to "back of beyond," Jerry Henderson found himself
absorbed in somewhat disquieting thoughts.

He gazed out with a dulled admiration on the fertility of blue-grass
farms where the land rolled with as smooth and gracious a swell as a
woman's bosom. Always heretofore the Central Kentucky mansions with
their colonial dignity and quiet air of pride had brought an eager
appreciation to his thoughts--the tribute of one who worships an
aristocracy based on wealth.

But now when he saw again the tangled underbrush and outcropping rock
of the first foothills, something in him cried out, for the first time
since boyhood, "I'm going home!" When the altitudes began to clamber
into the loftiness of peaks, with wet streamers of cloud along their
slopes, the feeling grew. The sight of an eagle circling far overhead
almost excited him.

Jerry Henderson was a soldier of fortune, with Napoleonic dreams, and
finance was his terrain of conquest. To its overweening ambition he had
subordinated everything else. To that attainment he had pointed his
whole training, cultivating himself not only in the practicalities of
life but also in its refinements, until his bearing, his speech, his
manners were possibly a shade too meticulously perfect; too impeccably
starched.

Where other men had permitted themselves mild adventures in love and
moderate indulgence in drink, he had set upon his conduct a rigid
censorship.

His heart, like his conduct, had been severely schooled, for upon
marriage, as upon all else, he looked with an opportunist's eye.

His wife must come as an ally, strengthening his position socially and
financially. She must be a lady of the old aristocracy, bringing to his
house cultivated charm and the power of wealth. She must be fitted,
when he took his place among the financially elect, to reign with him.

So it was strange that as he sat here in the smoking-car he should be
thinking of an unlettered girl across Cedar Mountain, and acknowledging
with a boyish elation that on the way to Lone Stacy's house he would
pass her cabin, see her--hear the lilting music of her laugh.

A